Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

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0:57 is going to be digitalwalkcutterscomenergyx X. What's going on guys, welcome back to another episode of The Willing Yesters. Podcast, got my buddy Ahmed here with hybrid, right? It was actually

1:06 put in my calendar as hybrid. And I was like, I don't think that's a thing that's hybrid. Yeah, that's right. Now it's a cool name. Dude, welcome. Thanks so much, Jake. What were you in from

1:13 again? I flew in from London. Nothing. But based between the US, UK, Europe, and Middle East. How much time do you spend here? In Houston? Yeah. Probably a couple months here. Okay. Yeah,

1:26 you spend a good amount of time. Yeah I mean, have you been in London in your entire life? No, born there, lived a little bit in Vancouver. Okay. Did a bit in LA as well. Okay. So whenever

1:38 I'm in the US, I tend to stay on the West Coast. Yeah, yeah. That's where more of my massive network in the tech ecosystem. Well, you came at a great time. It's super hot and muddy outside. So,

1:46 we specially learn a suit. I'm sure you're just sweating through that thing. Really quickly, what is hybrid? So, we effectively, we create, unique reality-based digital twins of complex

2:00 facilities. Okay. So we go to an oil term or refinery nuclear power plant, those types of assets. And then we capture the as-is condition of those assets. So we go there, laser scan, take video,

2:15 and then we generate a 3D reality model. And then you've got the ability to basically use that for operation and maintenance day-to-day, both in the field and remotely. Okay Is the use case mostly

2:28 more complex facilities like refineries or is there also applications on the upstream side like we like well sites? Yeah, so I've heard some operators who are keen to test it out on the upstream

2:38 side. From our perspective, we wanted to go to the more complex end of the spectrum, look at the spaces that most solutions are not really good fit for. We wanted to find, prove ourselves there,

2:51 right? Prove it in an environment that's tough to prove, 'cause if it works there, it works everywhere. So what's your best way to come from one of the gas? You a tech guy who's a Globetrotter,

3:01 he's traveling over the world. So

3:04 I'm a mechanical engineer by qualification. So we did that at UCL. Okay. Did four years, my master's there. I actually met my co-founder and day one of university. Okay. So in the lecture hall,

3:18 sitting front row, he's sitting next to me. And then from then on, we basically did all of our group projects together, we did, but master's thesis together. And that's where the idea for hybrid

3:29 started to keep, to form. And yeah, I mean, he, so

3:37 after graduating, I always thought I was gonna go

3:44 to finance. So I went into private equity. Yeah. I got involved in setting up an office in industrious fund with CBRE in the UK regional. Yeah. And then within the same, I got bored of real

3:53 estate within the same private equity firm. They had an opportunity to start buying affordable private schools in emerging markets, Iraq, Georgia, Bosnia, Nigeria, so on. I got involved there.

4:03 I mean, it was pretty quick. We went in, it was a distress sale, bought the assets very cheap, flipped the whole group within sort of 12 to 13 months time. And at that point, I was free. And

4:14 in parallel with that Mo, my co-founder, Mo, he was working at a company called Costain. That's a tier one engineering company in the UK And he was basically building up one of, what became one

4:26 of Europe's largest robotics and digitalization teams. There's one of two people in that team that ended building that up. And they were deploying robotic systems like crawlers, drones, and so on,

4:36 on oil, oil and gas, rail, road, water, wastewater, all critical infrastructure sectors. And what he was

4:50 saying to me all the time was,

4:52 I've got this 3D model that I've generated by using photogrammetry. I've got

4:58 UT thickness from a crawler. I've got visual data from a drone. How do I, how do I, I can't really use, but the guys on the field can't use this day to day. So there's got to be a better way to

5:10 do that. You must be able to give those insights and the data to the people who are working in the field. And that's when the idea, so when the PE fund exited the asset, the education business, I

5:23 sat down with Mo and I said, Hey Mo, look. There's a UK government competition coming up. And they're looking to fund companies in the robotics in the AI space. And so, why don't we take what we

5:36 were doing in our master's thesis and basically expand that to go and focus on building a solution for industrial asset management? When we came up with the idea for what is now our clarity platform,

5:49 which takes the 3D. data, the reality-based data, and then augment other data types on top of it and so on. And then you can use that in the field too. It's both augmented reality and web-based.

6:01 That's sort of the shortened version of it, and I can go into much more detail if you like. Let's address what I would consider to be the elephant in the room. There's

6:13 a lot of digital twin solutions out there, right? And so you're walking through the challenges that Mo is facing, whether it be then or maybe even now, how do you guys feel like you are

6:24 differentiating that space and really like, you know, creating a solution that's not really out there? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, in fairness, I think we've been thinking

6:33 about it since we started off, right? It's been four and a half, five years now.

6:37 But it boils down to two things. One is the fact that we're a reality-based solution, meaning there's no other solution out there that reflects reality in the way that we do. And if I showed you

6:48 the solution, I would demonstrated visually for you but we give the operators the ability to keep their digital twin up-to-date. So it's not a single one-time investment and then you forget about it

6:59 and then it starts to deviate from the reality of the asset. We allow you to keep it up-to-date the entire time.

7:06 When something changes, you finish a project, the guys on site can do a video themselves, model gets updated, drawings get updated alongside that. That's one element so it's truly reality-based

7:18 And then the other is the fact that it's a comprehensive CMS, right, maintenance management system. It's something that includes, all the way from low-to to permitting, to key box management, to

7:33 all of the really technical elements of managing or doing work on site, we looked at how they're being done and we looked at how do we take the human factors out of it? How do we make it more

7:44 streamlined? How do we take the risk out of making potential errors? we're doing work on. So, we've incorporated, you know, we sort of redesigned the way that operation in maintenance should

7:55 look on an industrial facility. Yeah. So, I think, you know, you showed it to me on our call a few weeks ago, so kind of spoiler alert. It's actually really cool. You guys guys see it. Walk

8:07 me through the process, right? So, right, you go out there and you're scanning these things It's something that you're doing with an iPhone or some people that are doing that or some people who

8:17 have one of these scanning devices. It's still pretty simple to use and you're able to just kind of like walk through and just get like, how does the scanning process work? Yeah, so, I mean, we

8:28 made it as sense of agnostic as possible. From mobile phones, you could take your iPhone out there. You could take any mobile phone out there, take video through to some of the more complicated

8:39 new age solutions Like, you know, now VisBackpack, that's doing LiDAR and imagery at the same time through to. Ground-based terrestrial laser scanners as well. So we use a mix of pretty much

8:53 anything We've even done some DSLR if you want to go super high resolution on the model We can we can take pretty much all of that all those formats of data. So it's Do you take all the data? Then

9:05 do you you guys yourself compile that into what becomes the 3d model is that and there's that something that on the? The visualization set is that something you guys built in house Is that something

9:16 that you guys are able to leverage using technology? Yeah, so it's a it's a it's a proprietary Algorithm we run for forgetting the raw data into the reality-based digital twin. So we've pretty much

9:29 engine in the whole stack from from ground up And that's what's taken quite a while and there's been many iterations of it like You know the first thought if I go back I was looking at an old sales

9:41 pack Um from a couple of years ago and I looked at the the quality of the model and I looked at the quality of the platform and I looked at it now, I'm like, Hey, this is two different companies,

9:51 right? It's almost embarrassing. You cringe a little bit, but that's a good sign. Yeah, if it wasn't embarrassing, then you launched too late, right? Yeah. It's always fun to go back. I keep

10:02 all of our

10:05 sales materials. I keep our old techs. I keep our old everything. Notes.

10:13 Yeah, just anything. I like to go back and reflect and be like,

10:18 we made a bunch of vlogs and stuff, and we still do. I went back and watched a vlog that we had done in this room

10:25 like four years ago. I think we were kind of just detailing behind the scenes of like what our problems were at the time. Yeah, we look back and it's like,

10:34 I wish I had those problems. You know, they're just so small compared to the challenges that we have to deal with today. Totally, right. But it's that thing. You don't know what you don't know

10:45 until you start diving deeper into it and it's been building the company. It doesn't matter how close to the problem. We thought we were, the more time you spend with operators, the more you

10:57 realize where the opportunities are. Those first few customers, in our case, those first few customers are the ones that really add the most value. They're not just customers, they're partners,

11:11 and you want them to be partners. You want them to be giving you as much feedback as you can on, Hey, it would be great if you could do X. It would be great if you could do Y. And then me and Mo,

11:21 we're sitting in those meetings together, and then we go back to the office and we're like, Hey, look, what if we could sketch out the product to do these certain things instead? And then surely

11:30 enough, a couple months later, that feature set is released.

11:36 I think you have to have a little bit of blind optimism as an entrepreneur to go out there. Like you said, you don't know what you don't know, and it's very easy to have this illusion that things

11:44 are easier than they seem. And then you give the weed, and you're You know, my God, this is a much bigger job. Yeah,

11:50 that happens all the time. So on the, so being reality-based, is there some sort of like mechanism of like, when things change or is there like a frequency of people having to go out there and

11:60 scan things? So the things match up, reality matches up with the models, matches up with the drawings, matches up with the data. Yeah. So we train the operators up on how to capture video for

12:15 the remodel to be made Yeah. So we train them up and then they use their mobiles or tablets when they're out in the field, obviously intrinsically safe, depending on what type of facility they're

12:25 on.

12:27 And then as soon as the video is done, the model will be updated within a matter of hours. Okay. And then the drawings alongside that are updated as well. Okay. So then once it's all uploaded,

12:39 what is the main use case? Coming from a guy, I've never been in a position to be an engineer, right? And so I don't use. digital twins, I don't use drawings, things like that. And so what we

12:52 threw, what are the use cases, like once I have it all in here, how are you making my life simpler? Yeah. So first of all, I mean, the ability to have all your asset documents, data and

13:05 drawings in one place is super powerful, right? Traditionally, they were using companies have got, these are facilities they've been running for 20, 30 plus years. And so you can imagine the

13:16 mess they have when it comes to looking for information, accurate information, reliable information. They've got to, they literally have a room, a physical archive where you're trying to go in

13:26 there and find this A0, A1 drawing,

13:30 P9D for a specific process on the facility. And more than often it's, you can't even, I mean, takes a long time to find and then when you find it, it's not even accurate. And then on top of that,

13:40 they made the problem worse by having, we call it platform fatigue, Right, so they're using multiple platforms just to do one job. they're logging into some document management system that's got

13:52 part of the of the asset documents in there. They're looking at ERP asset master database like SAP for example, they're looking at

14:02 the physical archive as well and then they're trying to connect it up with a CMMS that's part online and then the permitting is done off. You just have sort of five or six different systems to use

14:13 when it comes to just doing day-to-day work and so we give them the ability to produce truly a single source of truth, a single platform to look at and reference when you're doing planning work or

14:25 executing work in the field. So that's sort of one of the key use cases that I mean spreads across pretty much everything they do looking for accurate asset information day-to-day. Another one is in

14:42 maintenance management. When you're planning the maintenance work

14:46 when you're planning the maintenance work. you need to know exactly when is it due? Who's done it? Was it actually done to the standard it should have been done at? Was it on the right component

14:56 even? There's been cases when you've had the wrong equipment being replaced because there was ambiguity around it. Just think about, they're going from really a database solution where you see

15:11 equipment name, work order, and you have no context beyond that Like, what does it look like, the size of it, things like that? Yeah, where is it? What does it look like? You have no idea.

15:24 Going to, hey, I just log in and I could literally just search for the component and I see exactly where it is. What if I click on the work order? I can see the entire thing planned out in 3D.

15:33 Step one, step two, step three. So routines, managing routines and regimes, you can do that completely without any ambiguity in the field as well Is there any tie in to, maybe this is a little

15:46 far off, like AR, like for, I don't know, like, I know, I know some solutions a few years ago, I don't know if those have gone on to be wildly successful or kind of flop. And I honestly just

16:00 haven't talked to too many companies. We had baselines on recently, which is super interesting on the, on the VR side. I'm kind of curious on the, their use case, I think is a little bit

16:10 different. Yeah. They're one that the subsurface geological side, but from like a maintenance perspective, particularly the digital twins, is there like any opportunities to do things where they

16:21 are? Yeah, we, we have an, we have an AR solution. I mean, we do it on the mobile right now, mobile and tablet. It's because of the computation power. Like you need quite a bit of processing

16:33 power to make sure the visualization is there, the data is being presented properly, the storage is there as well, because we're, you know, you need an offline version if you're doing AR,

16:42 because sometimes you get underground and there's no connectivity. So you have to think to add all of these things before you ship. You know production grade product. So we've kept it to mobile and

16:51 tablet. So the guys in the field. They do use AR Right, so they pull it out localizes exactly where they're standing using just the camera no GPS And then they're moving around and you can see the

17:03 components in the field tap it see where it is in the drawing It takes you two seconds. It literally two seconds And then you can see the work order you're supposed to be doing

17:13 you know everything is is is really you know right at different tips in the field and

17:20 That's for one of our major clients that was a mandatory one. There was one of the key Capabilities that they use to justify the investment right and they're saying within a 12 month period on any

17:34 facility of theirs They can get a 2x return on investment Wow, and that's one of the key capabilities of that in saving time and reducing the potential for errors and so on. Yeah, when we think

17:47 about AR in the context of like wearing glasses, but I always forget about, you know, hey, you've got a phone with a camera right here and being able to see right through that. Like that's, yeah,

17:55 it's like a really low hanging fruit. It's really cool that you guys have built that. I don't think it's a side tangent. I don't know if you saw that Google Maps released their like immersive view.

18:05 Did you see that? The immersive view on phone. On the phone to where like whenever you're looking at two paths that you want to take. Right The birds that I've like fly over. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:18 And so like if, I don't know, say you're going to go for a bike ride, right? And you want to take the scenic route? Yep. You can go and it'll do a flyover of both. And you're like, oh, this

18:27 is the more scenic route. It's like, it's mind blowing. That's awesome. From like, especially coming from your map quest back in the day, everybody would like print off the instructions. You

18:39 have like seven papers of instructions and

18:42 you're like, take a, take a, take a ride here.

18:46 It's like hilarious, like pre-GPS days, obviously.

18:51 Yeah, no, I think that the fly everything is awesome, but you know, the oil and gas equivalent of that is a walk around, right? So you set the route and you can do it in the solution. You set

19:02 the route and you've got observation checkpoints and you take the scenic routes and seeing is everything exactly how it's supposed to be looking on the site and you can verify that the folks have gone

19:13 and done that. That's awesome. So what are the most of the use cases that you you guys are working on now? Is it. I know we talked a little bit about upstream, I know we talked a little bit about

19:22 the refineries. Yeah, so I'm in Houston right now because of ILTA. Okay. You're familiar with ILTA. I don't think so. The International Liquid Tank Association. Okay, so really niche. Yes,

19:35 super niche, but I mean,

19:39 pretty much everyone that distribute oil and gas across the entire US. and even South America. Um, it comes the ILTA, right? And they're the members of the ILTA or, or they just come and check

19:52 it out. We did it last year as well. And then we've done it this year. And it was, it's been superbly, uh, it was super, super successful. Like really, you know, yesterday, I sent out 15

20:04 proposals off the one day. And really, yeah. Wow. Off the one day of, when you guys like showcasing the technology there, it was, you just, yeah. So, so I was presenting on the Monday. Okay

20:14 Uh, I was presenting with Magellan, Magellan Metropolitan Park was recently acquired by, by, by one of, um, about how we digitally transformed basically one of their facilities in Springfield,

20:27 Missouri. And, um, you know, off the back of that, we had a whole heap of, of, of interest playing over to the, to the booth as well. And we were doing live AR demos showing the entire

20:39 workflow from here, you know, here's localizing on this mini tank setup we had with milk made. some makeshift tank that my CTO, brilliant

20:50 CTO, Mo had just came up with and he did it evenings and weekends and I didn't even know what to expect but we got there and everyone was really impressed by what was made. So we're doing this AR

20:59 demo and tagging observations, creating notifications, work orders, planning them in 3D. People liked it a lot. That's awesome, man. I didn't remember when you showed it to me, I'm like, yeah,

21:12 it speaks for itself. It's one of those things that I think that once you see it, you're like, Ah, light bulbs go off. Yeah, that's how it should be, right? Good solution should be obvious.

21:21 It should be intuitive. You should see it and be like, Hey, why did this not exist before? And if it exists, why am I not using it today?

21:32 You guys have been doing this for five years now? Five years.

21:38 What went through some of the challenges that you guys have had over the years? Was it building the technology, was it really honing in on what the exactly. The problem was, is it the

21:48 going-to-market strategy? I mean, it seems like it's practically cells itself, so that seems like it's going well. And it's what we've been doing a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I wish it was

21:56 selling itself from the beginning, right? Like, it's never like that. But when you find that product market fit, that's when it really started to ramp. So some of the challenges, I guess

22:08 there's two types. One is like business challenges, and the other is like product challenges. But I'll start with product It's a bit simpler.

22:16 When we first started building the clarity solution, we were very focused on visual inspection. We were looking at drones and mobile phones and looking at how can you use that 3D capability to make

22:29 inspection more efficient. So we built this awesome platform, awesome solution. This is 2019, the end of 2019. Yeah

22:41 just came out of tech stars and we were. picked up a lot of momentum and we had clients that were using this, they started using this visual inspection solution and we realized, Hey, you know what,

22:50 they only want to pay between

22:54 1, 000 to 2, 000 per license per year. And then you had all the other existing names in that market who were charging pretty similar to that, but they already had that market share and we couldn't

23:06 really compete with them. And frankly, I didn't think the market was big enough. Like when I was doing the math, I was like, It's not big enough. How many drone service providers are going to

23:15 buy this license from us? You know, and

23:20 what is the potential of that? And then if you go up one level, so this is what we decided, we said, Hey, we don't want to compete with the drone service providers. Let's go up the value chain.

23:28 Let's go to the tier one contractors. Yeah. So we speak to pretty much all the tier one contractors and they say, Hey, this looks great. You know, let's tie it into our drone division, our

23:38 robotics division. And they say, How much does it cost? And you tell them and they say, Okay,

23:44 pay you somewhere between 10, 000 and 30, 000 a year for a license.

23:51 But the volume of them is just a lot smaller. So it's a much smaller market. And we're like, Hey, if you're running the economics again, you're like, I still don't think this makes sense. I

23:60 think this doesn't make any sense. So where is the real money? The real money is at the operators. And then we start pitching to all the operators, the majors, and the guys they see it, Hey,

24:13 this looks awesome. You know, I can see that this is the best inspection solution we've seen.

24:20 It's the best inspection solution we've seen. But

24:24 we don't even know what we spend on inspection. We don't have budget for inspection. I could barely tell you what we spend on it. And so we're like, Me and most of them are like, Oh,

24:35 like, hey, shit. No one's going to buy this. Even if they like it, they're not going to buy it because they can't justify the investment Yeah. So. So I remember saying to him, You know what?

24:44 We need to go inspection is great. Finding the observation is great. We need to go beyond that. And he said, What do you mean? You know, doing maintenance is a whole different beast. And I'm

24:57 like, Let's just go with it. Let's just go with it,

25:02 right? Let's just figure it out together

25:10 And then COVID happened, and there were some hard times when it was like

25:16 we were trying to

25:20 complete this pivot from inspection to inspection, maintenance software, when we were doing this pivot, tightrope pivot, the funding market dried up massively, and that was a

25:32 really, really scary time. But out of the end of it, we found an operator that was willing to take a flyer on us. and we started working with them, and they started helping us build that

25:45 maintenance system, and then we showed it to other companies in the space, and they loved it. And then outside of oil and gas as well, we started finding other industrial operators, and they said,

25:56 Hey, this solves our problems as well. So we just started seeing all of these parallel markets expanding as well with that. So on the maintenance side, did you have much resistance there outside

26:07 of like, obviously like COVID and stuff? Like was there like, Oh, we're already using a lot of solutions like Maximo. I think it's a few other like things. Or is it like, Oh, we plugged that

26:16 Maximo into hybrid and just make a more complete system. Yeah, I think at the beginning, we were a little naive. We're thinking, Hey, you know what, you've got the best, we made the best

26:25 system out there. You guys should just replace whatever you're using. And then of course in reality, they're like, No, we've got 25 years of data in this and we've spent hundreds of million

26:37 dollars on it. We're not just going to get rid of it for this one that came out a couple of years ago. So, now the way we resolve that was

26:51 you have the master database, the old EAM CMMS system that sits as this layer one solution. So SAP, whatever it is, info, Excel and whatever. And then we've got clarity as this smart layer two

27:04 solution So the effect of the user's interface with clarity and then the layer one solution is kept up to date behind the scenes. So it's two way communication, always synchronized. So I made the

27:19 exact same sin. I can know the same sin. It was my first startup here in oil and gas. And so we had built a platform for wells. And so the best way to think about it was like a CRM, contacts or

27:35 companies as well. It was a really, really simple way to see, you know, well-level economics, least-level economics were one of the cool companies. And it was built in

27:60 a way that you really needed to use a lot of these features across multiple departments, right? Which sounds very utopian. It sounds like, oh, it's the perfect solution that's going to like

28:00 encompass all these workflows. And you have like a single, really easy to use, think for all your data. And then you get into it and then reality sets. And it's like, wait, we're trying to

28:03 replace not just a production system, but like you're replacing areas in PhD events, your type curves, we're trying to replace your accounting system, which is like the land system. And then you

28:16 get in, you're like, this does not work. This does not work. And so I, for my second version that I never really got off the ground, we pivoted from replacing everything to integrating

28:30 everything, right? And just through doing this for the last four and a half years, It's definitely a common theme of those that play well with others and that can piggyback on a lot of other things.

28:42 We're not having to rip out systems. Those are the ones that really, really take off. I think one of the rapid growth stories that I remember would be, there's a company called QEngineering and

28:53 they were a spot fire plugin. So rather than trying to go head to head with something that everybody in the industry already had, they built a plugin to leverage what they already. So you're not

29:02 selling somebody on the fact that, oh, you need to go and get spot fire competitors. You already have it. I'm just gonna sell you some of the plugin. Yeah, yeah. And they sold pretty rapidly

29:11 like after that. So I think it's a really, really good strategy that you guys are deploying there. How big, tell me about the company. How big is the team now? I know you had just mentioned you,

29:20 Mo, and I don't know if this is any other co-founders. No, just two of us. I mean, we've got about 30 other people. 30? Yeah, it's about 30. Oh man, I didn't know what you guys said.

29:31 Yeah, it's about 30 people So Mo, Mo, we've spends. most of his time in the Middle East, so he's in Dubai, and then we've got a team in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, and then

29:45 obviously in the UK as well, and then we've got folks, a few sort of visitive folks

29:53 in Africa and in the US as well. Wow. Were you seeing the out of all those, like were you seeing the most traction? That's a good question. So,

30:04 it's interesting. I mean, we see most of the traction in Europe and US for sure, without a shadow of a doubt. I'm just thinking about sectors as well. So, probably our cement customer base is

30:20 about the same size as our oil and gas customer. And

30:24 we were never chasing cement. It just happened. It just happened. But, you know, the two world's biggest cement companies are our clients now. One of them signed a five year transformation

30:33 mandates. did a press release about it a couple of, maybe the last month, a couple of months ago.

30:40 But those, both of those are headquartered in Europe. And then the oil and gas is a mix of US, UK, Europe. And then in the Middle East, in APAC, we're looking at partners who are going to sell

30:54 it out there for us. So we've just signed two mandates with partners that want to distribute it out there. I hear all these stories. You know, a lot of friends who are spending a lot more time in

31:05 the Middle East and selling solutions and stuff. I'm curious from your opinion, is doing business out there significantly different than doing it in the US or Europe? Yeah, it's definitely

31:16 different from doing it. Yeah, I mean, they

31:22 have a lot of focus on something called in-country value Right, like something they need to have representation, they need to have representation there, and quite often it needs to have, you know,

31:33 a local face on the front of it that's selling the solution. And the other bit, the other part of that is

31:41 reposition is everything, right? So you need someone with a high degree of influence that can actually get you the deals that you want to make in the region, especially working with big companies.

31:52 Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's funny. So yeah, I've heard all of that. But also the inverse, I've seen companies that are, you know, from the Middle East coming to the US and selling, and like

32:03 their first priority is like, let's get us a white guy in the United States to be like our beauty. They're like, we need, we need a liaison to this market, right? So that just kind of clicked

32:14 for me because I can think of a few examples of that. That's like so funny. So you guys, I think you mentioned Techstars. You guys did that pretty early on, right? Yeah, we did it 2019. So I

32:28 mentioned to you about UK government. So if I go back a little bit to to how the company was.

32:33 funded. So the PE firm that I was working with them, they sold

32:39 the education business, they wrote our first pre-C check, and then quite quickly after that, the UK government matched that. And they put us in this robotics and AI track. And effectively, they

32:54 had this global expert mission, like a sending UK leaders, 10 UK leaders in robotics and

33:02 AI send them to the US as delegates to represent the UK. And in one of the rooms, there was this panel, and it was

33:12 managing director for Techstars, who was putting together this space program, in all of our space program. First one that they were running, and there was the head of partnerships for NASA JPL,

33:25 there was,

33:27 I can't remember the other two fix in the panel exactly, but

33:31 Effectively, they were putting together this program. And I spoke with Matt Kozlov, he had MD from Techstars. And he says, hey, you know, I think what you're building is interesting,

33:42 you know, let's say in touch and then fast forward a little bit. We ended up, yeah, being based out in LA, me and Mo, being based out in LA for the best part of six

33:52 months in this Techstars program. And it was, it was fantastic. It was really eye opening to see that sort of West Coast mentality around entrepreneurship. And when you're building business in the

34:05 UK or in Europe, they

34:08 don't really have the same vibe. It's much more transactional there. Whereas what we learned in the West Coast was this concept of give first, right? Like

34:19 help the ones that need your help because you were helped at some point in your journey as well. And do that without expectation. So that was really important, that value. And me and Mo, we loved

34:30 it. We're like, hey, this is like a family. And that was a life-changing experience. Just going through that and building that network out on the West Coast. And my co-founder Mo, he's much

34:42 more risk of us. When I told him we were going to the space program, tech-style space program. He's like, hey, why are we going to the space program? Do we need to go over? Like, what's the

34:54 point in the night? And I was saying, no, we should go. We should do it. No, no, we shouldn't. I said, dude, this is one of those ones where I'm going to make a recommendation. And I'll

35:04 really stand by it. And you'll thank me later. And he's like, relax, and he goes out there. And then we come back. And I said, what do you think? He said, that was the best thing we ever did.

35:13 That was the best thing we ever did. Well, we're just learning. The key takeaway is there. I just learned so much, really. Like the program is like three months. And the first month is - they

35:22 call it mental madness. I mean, they're changing the name now but they 200 like out flew.

35:27 mentors from around the world, former founders, investors,

35:33 just advisors, corporate executives as well. And you just get to test out your business thinking on them and the business idea on them. And they will challenge you and you come out at the end of

35:45 that month with 1000 data points on feedback from people that have built stuff before, and done it successfully. And then you use that as a, you start to build your own framework for what, you

35:56 know, what you need to build a successful company. And out of the back of, off the back of that was when we realized, hey, we need to pivot from inspection to a much more valuable solution. So,

36:08 you know, really thanks to them on that. And then the other parts like teaching you how to, um, teaching frameworks and tools on how to build, build startup and teaching you how to pitch and

36:16 things like that. And we were early on in my entrepreneurial journey. I think it was, um, it was a lot of naivety, um, just thinking I don't know, just a ton of ambition and just being like,

36:27 oh, I could do anything. And

36:32 yeah, I remember, I applied to a few incubators and accelerators and stuff with various startups that we had done and never, never got into the ones that I wanted to get into, like the tech stars

36:44 or the Y Combinator or something like that. But I think I discounted the value early on, but I think having done this for the last decade, I think it definitely could have shortened the learning

36:54 curve, especially in just getting access to more founders earlier on. I think that when I think of key moments throughout my career that have really reshaped the way they think about certain things,

37:06 it was like always conversations with other founders who've probably done pretty well for themselves. Or it was a post-mortem or it was like, Hey, I've done something to avoid this mistake, kind

37:17 of at all costs and learning from their challenges there. So

37:22 I look back and I think that's one of the few things I think I would do differently would be to try to participate in something like that and surround yourself. I definitely believe that not all of

37:33 those programs are created equal. I think that it's just like anything else, universities or whatever, but you've got some that are just really, really high caliber, but they're obviously

37:44 investing heavily into those programs, tech stars being up

37:49 there, for sure. It's really cool to hear So after that, did you guys, I think you got your first few checks of funding that way, did you guys just continue to just grow that way, did you guys

38:01 go raise more funding? So there

38:04 was a round that was coming together, just at the beginning of just pre-COVID, yeah, yeah, yeah, really, really great time. I was

38:13 doing the road to New York, Houston, LA, San Francisco, and we recognized, you know, talking about integrations, we recognize one of the partners we needed to integrate with

38:26 So, they were running this

38:31 program to help start up enablements, partnership, enablements. And I was in Houston at the time

38:39 with one of my colleagues. And they said, SAP COO reached out and he said, Hey, I'm in Tokyo right now

38:49 If you can come and present to us tomorrow or in two days time, we can probably fast-track the partnership. I said, Okay. And I said to my colleague, I said, There's no way in how I'm going to

39:05 Tokyo in two days time. And it's one meeting, right? It's one hour, one hour and a half. And he's like, You know, you're going to get on the plane, right? I said, No way, I'm not And he

39:17 said, You know, you're going to get on the plane, and then in the end, we booked the flight and then, you know, I get on the plane within sort of. It's a whole flight too, isn't it? Yeah, it

39:27 was Houston to LA, which was about three hours. And then LA to Tokyo, which was at 11 hours. Oh. I think it was rough. 11 or 12 hours, yeah. Didn't get any sleep, landed at 7 am, meeting was

39:39 at 12, and I was prepping the presentation on the flight,

39:45 for opening the presentation on the flight, got there at 12, I felt horrific. Anyway, somehow managed to get through it, and then by about 6 pm, flew back. To LA, to LA, yeah, yeah, yeah,

39:57 yeah, yeah. Flew back to LA, and then carried on the roadshow. LA San Francisco. But when I was in Tokyo, there were 100 confirmed COVID cases in Japan.

40:10 And I'm sitting - And this was like really, really early on, right? This was like a big number. March 2020, right, yeah. We wouldn't know what COVID was really in the rest of the world at this

40:19 point. And I'm sitting in the airport about to board the plane, seeing how they're checking if people have any symptoms. And it's just, they're asking, right? The flight attendants is asking

40:32 saying, do you have any of these symptoms? And everyone, of course everyone's saying, no, I'm fine. And then I'm thinking, when I was in LA, I was like, I need to get back home. I need to

40:42 get out of here. This is gonna go far and wide. Yeah. And I need to get back

40:48 home. So I got back to London, where commitments for the round, everything looked like it was going smoothly. And then I had this lunch meeting in Paris. I went to Paris on the Eurostark, two

41:01 hours, two hours back, same day. Then I went to bed that night. And I was wiped out for like four weeks. I was wiped out. You got it. You were one of the first ones. Yeah, and I was calling.

41:13 I was calling to test me every day. I'm like, test me. They said, yeah, we're coming. Test me, yeah, we're coming. They never came. And I was wiped out for four weeks. I had light

41:23 sensitivity. I couldn't hold my laptop. I couldn't do anything. I was like,

41:28 and I could, I'm feeling guilt at the same time. I'm like, I can feel all the momentum I built dissipating. Yeah. And then of course I get on a call with the, with the GPS from the fund that

41:36 made a commit to lead the round and, and, uh, and they say, Hey, you know, given the market conditions, we want to see three, four, five more deals. I'm like, I'm like, you guys knew we

41:47 were at the end of runway. Yeah

41:51 And you, you're, you're moving the goalposts and they said, yeah, you know, that's, that is what it is. And so we had to get really creative, really creative to go and, um, you know, keep

42:03 the, the team, it was a, it was about 10, 10 people at that point in time. Yeah. I get really creative to, to keep the 10 people on board. And I mean, it was, it went from bad to worst to

42:13 worst to us for like 10 months before everything got

42:17 sold What do you feel like was the number one thing you kind of attributed to? the perseverance that you guys had during this 10 months, 'cause I can relate, man. We've had challenging times,

42:30 probably more than people would know. You continue to put on your game phase, you show up to work, you do things, and you're

42:39 putting the whole company on your back personally and really going all in. And I don't think a lot of people realize just how stressful that can be, but it's like when you have that conviction and

42:53 you know, I've got something good here, like you're staring down the barrel of like, oh, I've got like four weeks of cash left, like you get creative and you just make shit happen. Yeah. You

43:02 know, I think that's what separates the weed from the chaff. It's really, I think entrepreneurship is just an endurance race. I think that as long as you just keep getting up, I think you can

43:13 eventually win. I've had disproportionately more failures and successes at this point. You're going to be a cockroach and you just got to be like unkillable and then I think that you can ultimately

43:24 get to where

43:32 you're going to be. Yeah, I agree with that completely right and most of our success is completely, you have a plan and then the real wins come from things that you never imagined right and then

43:38 you look back and you trace it to how it happened. Yeah, of course right it makes it kind of makes sense then but you know your question about is there anything I put it down to? I mean same thing

43:49 I'm just I'm just stubborn yeah yeah I'm just I think you have to be yeah yeah I think you have to be stubborn whenever you uh whenever you're funny stuff you're like nah this is this is gonna work

43:59 yeah yeah I mean just just like even when it's really tough I never consider like it's just not an option yeah to not exist you know what I mean it's never been like hey you know what maybe it's the

44:13 best thing to do. It's never even crossed my mind and it's like. I know we're gonna find a way to do this and then you just need everyone else to support, the team support to go and ride the wave.

44:22 And

44:24 yeah, you know, that's it. But to your point, right?

44:30 It's a lot of business building. And this was one of the other bits about textiles was, when you spoke with successful founders, there would be these sessions that they had where they gave you the

44:38 really raw crude version of their journey, the bit that's not publicized And almost every one of them had at least had at least one moment where they should not have existed after that.

44:53 Or every single one had at least one of them. And it's just part of the journey, right? It's part of the journey of building. And that's the

45:06 journey you choose to go down. But no,

45:12 I enjoy it You have to be a masquer so you have to enjoy the punishment. But it's like, there's different kinds of, there's different kinds of hard. There's like this hard, but I think what would

45:21 be harder for me, at least the way that I'm wired, would be to hang it up and say, I'm gonna go get a job, right? Because I would live, I don't know, like entrepreneurship for me is like, it's

45:32 like oxygen, man. And it's like anytime, yeah, it's just literally not an option for me just to be like, oh yeah, I'm gonna like go get a job somewhere. Even if it's like the greatest paying

45:43 job on the world, I think I would, I just really struggle within the confines. I'm unemployable. Yeah. I feel you. So that's, so that to me is significantly harder than

45:56 the hardest day in entrepreneurship, you know, of not having that,

46:01 I don't know, just being the master of your own destiny and being able to create from nothing, something that changes the world, makes the world better. I think that's the gratification that we

46:13 look for as entrepreneurs.

46:17 For me, it's been, I've been wanting to build it since I was, you know, a kid building or selling something, the entire way. I was the same way. I thought that being an inventor was like,

46:27 because that would, I didn't know any business owners. I didn't know any entrepreneurs, right? Yeah. So, as a kid, I was always creating things. I was like inventing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So,

46:37 that should have been like an early marker of, I mean, wanting to do start up live. Yeah. That's one of the things they look for, right? VCs They look for, have you been building for the best

46:47 part of the life? Have you been looking to go and create value in some way? Do you want to create? And if you've done it historically, then it's a sign that you want to keep on doing it going

46:59 forward. Yeah. Yeah. So, your whole story about VCs and them being like, you know, hey, them knowing you've got a certain amount of runway and you're like, ah, you can only show it like, I

47:08 can't tell you just, how many just VC stories there? that we have as well. And then I've heard, and I think early on, I feel like there was this,

47:21 I don't know, like you see so many founders that go on and they become successful and they're like, Oh, I'm gonna go do like the VC thing. That's the cool thing to do. And that is like, I don't

47:33 wanna do that. I thought I wanted to do that at one point in time. I don't wanna do that 'cause I mean, you used to glorified finance guy And

47:43 it's soul sucking, isn't it? To raise money from some of these VCs sometimes. Yeah. Especially you're pitching your baby. And especially when you get to somebody who's just like, they just don't

47:52 get it, they don't understand. You're having to try to convince them that your baby's pretty and that you are gonna be successful. And it's just, I don't know. It's hard not to develop a chip on

48:02 your shoulder over time or become jaded through the process of talking to hundreds and hundreds of VCs Yeah, I think selling product and selling equity are too difficult. And yeah, two different

48:15 modes, right? And the most, honestly, after

48:21 that experience, I said, you know what, let's put our heads down. Let's

48:27 work only with people that we know and we trust and let's make sure that they're strategically involved and

48:34 that I can learn from them and so on. And I'm gonna just focus on selling shit, right? I'm just gonna focus on revenue I'm gonna focus on winning accounts, kind of capital. It's not delayed if.

48:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but it's also, I mean, that's the life blood of a business, right? I mean, if you don't know, if you don't have revenue, you don't have customers, you

48:53 don't have people that want your product. You have a hobby, a very expensive hobby if you don't have revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing that it did was it forced, like running that

49:01 lean forced us to find a model that was profitable from the beginning, right? It had to work, the pricing had to work. There was none of this, hey, you know what?

49:13 You know, some time startups are saying the naming big names and they're saying they're our customers and then you ask them what's the contract value and they say zero or like 10k because it's a,

49:24 you know, it's some nominal fee. But that's not what we wanted to build. We wanted to build something where we proved the product market fit work, the pricing as well as the market fit worked.

49:36 And then we want to just, you want the right capital to go and pull fuel on the flame And so, you know, I've been avoiding as much as I can, investor discussions. The only investors we've brought

49:48 on are former founders who've got energy, energy investments or energy experience. So, one of them sold a really successful exit, sold as company to Accenture here in Houston. And then the other

50:02 one started a major international oil and gas company, sold

50:08 it to Brookfield energy, a rapid equity firm, and you know.

50:13 big believer in me and the team and the company put a check in as well and I mean those types of relationships I value a lot.

50:26 I will say that there are definitely some VCs who are really value adding team players, roll up their sleeves, get in the trenches with you and I'm talking to a couple of them right now

50:39 just sort of coincidentally and they're wanting to get involved and leave the next round that's coming up.

50:47 Again, I mean it's not been a planned round, it's just sort of happening and then there's a customer with a venture capital arm that wants to get involved in that as well. So it's,

50:58 you know, I think as long as you have the right lead, as long as the right person who's sitting on the board, as long as you have the right partner to go and work with them at the front, the sort

51:05 of rest of it, as long as it's not complacent, you know, difficult or high maintenance capital Um,

51:13 It'll be worth it. Yeah, I think the right investors and partners and backers can really make, make or break you, to be honest with you. Anybody, if you find the right partners, we've got some

51:24 guys that have supported us over the years and love them to death. They're like, they're a great sounding board, they believe in us. Yeah, they're just always there to help in any way possible.

51:37 And so, yeah, finding some guys who really just believe in, they believe in us as founders, kind of first and foremost, and they just trust our judgment of the business, which is, I think

51:47 really important, there's no playbook for what we do. So, get a, kind of come with an open mind and be creative. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, similar thing here, I think there's a

51:58 lot of playbooks for consumer startups, consumer play startups, and even some B2B, but I think when it comes to enterprise, like selling to operators and enterprise businesses, that is hard,

52:11 right? super hard. And I wish there were more playbooks or more people that could go and say, Hey, you know, this is exactly the right thing to do. But I think at some point in time, I'll go

52:23 back a year or two, we were like figuring it out. We're like, Hey, is this the right way to do this? And now it works now, right? The proof is in the pudding. And we get to go and enjoy that,

52:35 having spent the time building that framework up ourselves

52:40 Yeah, it's just like that, right? Building enterprise companies, never a smooth job. Yeah, it's complex to build, it's complex to sell, it's complex to market. There's a lot of challenges

52:54 really across the entire life cycle. Yeah, 100 and educating, right? Education is the first step of that. Like there are so many stakeholders in that company, which one has the ability to sign

53:07 off on it? Yeah

53:10 And what do they pre-work because it's a sign that all? and how do you deliver the exact right message to the exact right people at the right time in the right way through the right medium medium

53:19 medium? That's what we're doing all the time. Every can't we work with, we're doing that all the time. It's like, how do you strategize? Yeah, I just strategize, I just strategize. That's

53:28 what it takes. That's what it takes to do enterprise. And, you know, really 80 of a visitor is still sitting on my shoulders, right? Still sitting on my shoulders. And I'm looking to go and

53:40 bring in some sales leadership to come in and support on that front. It's very, very soon. The other one we realized that founder-led sales is

53:48 not only just important, I think it's almost crucial, especially in the early days, because what you're searching for is product market fit, right? And it's very hard to not be in the weeds

53:57 yourself or if your sleeves hire somebody to come in from like day one and just be yourself person, because what you're doing is you're getting feedback from the market, you're understanding, you

54:07 know, what are their challenges? You're seeing the different opportunities, you guys have displayed. you know, multiple pivots over the years, you know, where that takes all of your attention

54:17 and the resources for the whole company. And so like, you need kind of that insight a little bit firsthand. And so I think it's one of the, that's one of the most valuable skills I think you want

54:25 as a founder is like, you've never done sales, like, you get schooled up on it pretty quickly. Because I think that that's that you ways the of one

54:33 can be a lot more successful. Absolutely, absolutely. I think, you know, it's hard for anyone outside of the business to come in and start to sell, especially when you're figuring out what

54:42 you're selling. It's hard, right? It's super tough. And I mean, one of my, one of my investor

54:52 board members, one of investment directors before was, you know, Adam, more sort of corporate mentality was, Adam, you should bring a sales guy in early, you should bring a sales guy in early.

55:02 And we, we brought one in early and inevitably didn't work out, right? Yeah. And, you know, it got messy and so on, but it didn't work out.

55:11 like, that's just part of it, like,

55:15 there was, there was no winning in that, in that setup. And you feel bad for, for, for having brought them on and so on. But

55:24 yeah, I think, I think from the outside in, if you haven't done startup before, you can look at, you can look at a business, say, Hey, you just throw sales people in and money starts, you

55:34 know, contracts start flying out, but it's not, it's not that simple. Like, if you don't understand the business and the product, then you don't know when to time bringing in salespeople. Yeah.

55:47 But it's not just salespeople. I mean, the same, that dynamic nature is the same for like, some people are built for it. Some people are not from developers through to, you

55:57 know, even operations folks, like the bar is just very high. When it comes to working in an early stage startup, like, if you were deficient in something everyone will notice it. Yeah. And

56:09 everyone will feel it. and then you have to find some way to address it. Yeah. But I'm thankful to say the team now is fantastic, but it hasn't been without its hiccups and lessons learned on how

56:24 to find, how to hire, write, how to, how to, how to, you know, fire one as well. Yeah. A

56:33 lot of challenges, man. Dude, this has been a great conversation. I'm super excited about your tech. We got each of you guys on a DW inside if you're not on there yet, so we'll, you guys can go

56:43 check that out. Thanks for making the trip. I know you do make it just for me, but like I feel, I feel honored that you

56:51 flew in. Yeah, love the conversation. So guys, if you like this, take two seconds. Leave us a little reading and review. Share this with all your friends and your colleagues, and we will catch

56:58 you guys on the next episode.